I currently have an ATI 5870, and since the ATI 6970 is only marginally faster, my only viable upgrade path (barring any magical new ATI card announcements in the next 3-4 months…) is to get another ATI 5870 and crossfire them.
However, I also use three monitors – not for gameplay, but for productivity reasons in Windows 7. All my gaming is, and will continue to be, on my single center monitor. I guess I could do eyefinity (spread one game across 3 monitors in ultra-mega-widescreen mode) but that’s not really why I am doing Crossfire. I am doing crossfire because I need more framerate at my preferred resolution than a single ATI 5870 can consistently deliver.
Are there any caveats I should know about with an ATI 5870 crossfire configuration – will I get boned if I want to use 3 monitors in Windows, but only 1 in games?
I went ahead and secured another ATI 5870 1GB for cheap-ish on eBay, so I’m going to give it a shot, but I’d like to hear any advice anyone has before I proceed.
You should be fine-- if you have it set up now so that you do three monitors for productivity and one for gaming, adding another card shouldn’t change that.
I use a similar configuration, though with a pair of 6970s. The 6970s scale a little better in CrossfireX than the 5870, but that’s about it. The most annoying thing is switching between single and multimonitor mode.
One thing you will notice is that noise levels will go up, and I know how that might drive you crazy, Wumpus.
Heat goes up and then noise caused by the fans having to cool down the extra heat. SLI/CrossFire has never been a good route to go since the next-gen card usually has that same performance with less noise and heat using up only one slot.
The only caveat is how you can keep from playing 12 porn videos at one time. That could display so much porn that my dick would explode. My monitor is only 4 porn videos big.
We are reaching the end of the current product life cycle at both Nvidia (5xx series) and AMD (6000 series). New GPUs are likely to be announced, if not shipping, within a few months.
Sorry wumpus, you don’t have any single-card that outperforms the 5870 available right now I guess.
Except for the 6990 which is… basically two 6950s… which is… basically the same speed as two 5870s. (edit: and it’s SEVEN HUNDRED MOTHER FLIPPIN DOLLARS to boot…)
If you aren’t using it for gameplay why are you using a BFBC2 benchmark?
“all my gaming is, and will continue to be, on my single center monitor.”
I use a similar configuration, though with a pair of 6970s. The 6970s scale a little better in CrossfireX than the 5870, but that’s about it. The most annoying thing is switching between single and multimonitor mode.
Do you mean switching in Windows by disabling secondary displays, or switching in the ATI Control Center? I have a hotkey mapped to “disable secondary displays” but only via the standard Windows mechanism, etc.
I mean Windows switching. I don’t really use Eyefinity, because I don’t like the way it handles the taskbar. That’s one area of improvement I’m looking forward to in Win8.
The problem is TMSC had trouble with their 32nm production node, cancelled it and skipped ahead to 28nm which is only just now close to being ready. This meant AMD and nVidia have been stuck at 40nm for over 2 years now. The Radeon 6XX0 cards were originally conceived as 32nm parts, but had to be scaled back to work in the limits of 40nm production. That’s why the performance delta between a 5870 and a 6970 isn’t that great. The 6970 has a bump in transistor count, but most of that was spent on optimizing the DX11 implementation.
When AMD and nVidia announce their 28nm parts the performance jump should be huge.
Recent rumors are TMSC will only make small amounts of 28 nm chips this year leading to further rumors that the next highend GPU’s from both ATI and nVidia will be delayed until early next year. Even if the low yield rumors are true I hope there’s at least something ready soon.
When AMD and nVidia announce their 28nm parts the performance jump should be huge.
That makes sense; I’m not expecting that to happen this calendar year, which leaves me with … crossfire for now. Not my ideal choice, but I got no other options for perf.
I’m sure early in 2012 this will all be resolved, hopefully.
Well, bummer – I have both cards installed in crossfire, and the ATI Catalyst drivers (latest official ver) seem to recognize them, but BF3 now crashes every time when I go from desktop to full-screen.
Ooh, scratch that, so does BF2:BC for that matter… investigating…
Both cards show up as valid in the ATI “list what hardware I have” part of catalyst control center – and I got prompted to turn on crossfire after installing it.
Primary Adapter
Graphics Card Manufacturer Powered by AMD
Graphics Chipset ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series
Device ID 6898
Vendor 1002
Subsystem ID 2289
Subsystem Vendor ID 1787
Graphics Bus Capability PCI Express 2.0
Maximum Bus Setting PCI Express 2.0 x8
BIOS Version 012.018.000.001
BIOS Part Number 113-C00801-XXX
BIOS Date 2010/02/08
Memory Size 1024 MB
Memory Type GDDR5
Core Clock in MHz 875 MHz
Memory Clock in MHz 1225 MHz
Total Memory Bandwidth in GByte/s 156.8 GByte/s
Linked Adapter
Graphics Card Manufacturer Powered by AMD
Graphics Chipset ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series
Device ID 6898
Vendor 1002
Subsystem ID 2289
Subsystem Vendor ID 1787
Graphics Bus Capability PCI Express 2.0
Maximum Bus Setting PCI Express 2.0 x8
BIOS Version 012.020.000.001
BIOS Part Number 113-C00801-100
BIOS Date 2010/03/31
Memory Size 1024 MB
Memory Type GDDR5
Core Clock in MHz 850 MHz
Memory Clock in MHz 1200 MHz
Total Memory Bandwidth in GByte/s 153.6 GByte/s
However, even after
turning off crossfire in the catalyst control center
I still get immediate crash to desktop on (almost) any 3d game. (Oddly enough Richard Burns Rally still works??) It seems like the mere presence of the 2nd card, active or not, causes breakage. Bummer. :(
I’ll have to try the 2nd card as the primary card (single-card) and see if that works, then maybe swap 'em around.
